This document describes a method to transport Internet Key Exchange Protocol (IKE) and IPsec packets over a TCP connection for traversing network middleboxes that may block IKE negotiation over UDP. This method, referred to as "TCP encapsulation", involves sending both IKE packets for Security Association establishment and Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) packets over a TCP connection. This method is intended to be used as a fallback option when IKE cannot be negotiated over UDP.

SP 800-56A specifies key-establishment schemes based on the discrete logarithm problem over finite fields and elliptic curves, including several variations of Diffie-Hellman (DH) and Menezes-Qu-Vanstone(MQV) key establishment schemes. Revision 3 approves the use of specific safe-prime groups of domain parameters for finite field DH and MQV schemes and requires the use of specific commonly used elliptic curves. In addition, all methods used for key derivation have been moved to SP 800-56C.

SP 800-56C has been revised to include all key derivation methods currently included in SP 800-56A and SP 800-56B, Recommendation for Pair-Wise Key-Establishment Schemes Using Integer Factorization Cryptography, in addition to the two-step key-derivation procedure currently specified in SP 800-56C. Note the change of title for SP 800-56C that reflects the inclusion of the additional key-derivation methods. SP 800-56C Revision 1 also includes the use of KMAC128 and KMAC256 as key-derivation primitives for the one-step key-derivation method.

NIST requests public comments on the release of Draft Special Publication 800-70 Revision 4, National Checklist Program for IT Products: Guidelines for Checklist Users and Developers. Using security configuration checklists to verify the configuration of information technology (IT) products and identify unauthorized configuration changes can minimize product attack surfaces, reduce vulnerabilities, and lessen the impact of successful attacks. To facilitate development of checklists and to make checklists more organized and usable, NIST established the National Checklist Program (NCP). This publication explains how to use the NCP to find and retrieve checklists, and it also describes the policies, procedures, and general requirements for participation in the NCP.

Application Containers are slowly finding adoption in enterprise IT infrastructures. To address security concerns associated with deployment of application container platforms, NIST Special Publication 800-190 (2nd Draft), Application Container Security Guide, identified security threats to the components of the platform hosting the containers and related artifacts involved in building, storing and using container images. It has also proposed countermeasures for the following components: Hardware, Host OS, Container Runtime, Image, Registry and Orchestrator.

To implement the countermeasures one or more security solutions are needed. To assess the effectiveness of the security solutions implemented based on these recommendations, it is necessary to analyze them and outline the security assurance requirements they must satisfy to meet their intended objectives. This is the contribution of Draft NISTIR 8176. The focus is on application containers on Linux platforms.

The security solutions for which security assurance requirements have been derived cover the following areas:

The DNS relies upon caching to scale; however, the cache lookup generally requires an exact match. This document specifies the use of NSEC/NSEC3 resource records to allow DNSSEC-validating resolvers to generate negative answers within a range and positive answers from wildcards. This increases performance, decreases latency, decreases resource utilization on both authoritative and recursive servers, and increases privacy. Also, it may help increase resilience to certain DoS attacks in some circumstances.

This document updates RFC 4035 by allowing validating resolvers to generate negative answers based upon NSEC/NSEC3 records and positive answers in the presence of wildcards.

This document defines the changes that need to be made to the Domain Name System (DNS) to support hosts running IP version 6 (IPv6). The changes include a resource record type to store an IPv6 address, a domain to support lookups based on an IPv6 address, and updated definitions of existing query types that return Internet addresses as part of additional section processing. The extensions are designed to be compatible with existing applications and, in particular, DNS implementations themselves.

Application container technologies, better known as containers, are a form of operating system virtualization combined with application software packaging. Draft (2nd) SP 800-190 explains the security benefits and concerns associated with container technologies and makes practical recommendations for addressing the concerns when planning for, implementing, and maintaining containers.